We are all in the chorus of Dystopia Limited

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The 19th-century vision of the responsible company has vanished, as workers are denied their share of the rewards

As a young chorus member in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Utopia Limited I recall singing the most unlikely refrain in musical theatre: “All hail, astonishing Fact!/ All hail, Invention new/ The Joint Stock Company’s Act/ The Act of Sixty Two”. It is astonishing to think that there is an operetta about the laws of limited liability, but there is.

If Andrew Lloyd Webber is reading this, I have a libretto planned for a companion piece to Utopia Limited. It’s a musical about the respective shares of British GDP that flow to capital and labour. I’m calling it Dystopia Limited and it